Almost everyone is using Internet and web-based services as a primary means of conducting business. Services such as email, e-commerce, Voice over IP (VoIP), and web-browsing have become critical to communication within and across organizations. As reliance on network based services increase, so do consumer demands for availability reliability, and responsiveness of the services. Typically, the customers do not care how the service is composed, to them the quality of service (QoS) is what is important. These quality of service expectations are driving customers to negotiate guarantees with their service providers that will meet customer service requirements for specific QoS levels. In order to offer end-to-end QoS guarantees to customers, more and more providers and customers are entering into Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
An SLA is a contract between a provider and a customer that guarantees specific levels of performance and reliability for a certain cost. Traditionally, SLAs have included performance guarantees such as response time and network availability, in addition to specifying customer support and help desk issues. One major problem with SLAs, however, is that they are limited to collecting statistical information on network performance and availability since the current state of the art does not allow manipulation of the network itself or the data flowing over the network at wire speed. Because SLAs are enforced after the fact based on statistical information, the only recourse to both provider and customer is an adjustment to payments or credits applied for future services.
Technology that would allow real time monitoring and dynamic allocation of network resources would allow providers and customers to take SLAs and service level management (SLM) to the next level. Such a technology would identify network resources that were reaching their maximum performance and allow the network to dynamically allocate additional resources, which could be metered and billed to the customer. Additionally, the customers would not be limited to resources in increments of carrier size, such as D3s, T1s or T3s, but instead would be able to specify their exact requirement and pay for exactly the resources consumed.
Further, new technology could be incorporated to include security features such as prevention of denial of service and monitoring for email viruses and worms. This would allow the provider to differentiate his services from other providers and would provide content that could be charged for by the provider. The customer would benefit by increased availability of their resources as well as being able to offload the expense of installing and maintaining security equipment to the provider.
Accordingly, what is needed is a network device that can enforce service level agreements by being able to recognize network traffic at wire speeds and by dynamically modifying the traffic or the network to accommodate performance and resource policies agreed to between the provider and customer. Further, the network device is able to provide security for the network that is maintained by the provider as a service to the customer.